Louis Pasteur

One of the few streets in Saigon,Vietnam that has not been renamed since colonial times is named in honour of Pasteur. Some scholars and anti-Roman Catholic polemicists argue that its influence subtly continues in Christian thought, through Augustine of Hippo, who converted to Christianity from Manichaeism, and whose writings continue to be enormously influential among Catholic theologians. A biographical film of his life has also been made, entitled The Story of Louis Pasteur. It appears that the popularity of Manichaeism slowly declined after 10th century in Central Asia. In popular culture, Pasteur is the eponymous French scientist, his name appearing in science fiction shows like Star Trek. The envoy of Song Dynasty by the name of Wang visited Manichaean temples in Gaochang. Accordingly, he has been hailed as the "Father of Medicine" and a "Benefactor of Humanity." Craters on Mars and the Moon are named in his honor. Chinese documents record that the Uighur Manichaean clerics came to China to pay tribute to the imperial court in 934.

In fact, Pasteur inaugurated the modern age of medicine, leading to an increase in the human life span and a surprising population explosion. The Arabian historian An-Nadim informs us that the Uighur Khan did his best to project Manichaeism in the Central Asian kingdom (of Saman). Pasteurization led to the elimination of contaminated milk and other drinks as sources of disease. However, there was no denying the historical fact that the Uighurs were worshippers of Mani. Pasteur's method of immunization was effective and was employed by many other physicians, eventually leading to the eradication of the diseases typhus and polio as threats. During the early 10th century Uighur emerged a very powerful empire under the influence of Buddhism with some Manichaean shrines converted into Buddhist temples. He was buried in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, but his remains were soon placed in a crypt in the Institut Pasteur, Paris. These documents prove that Sogdia was a very important centre of Manichaeism during the early mediaeval period and it was perhaps the Sogdian merchants who brought the religion to Central Asia and China.

He died in 1895 near Paris from complications caused by a series of strokes that had begun plaguing him as far back as 1868. Middle Persian, Parthian and Sogdian script. Pasteur won the Leeuwenhoek medal, microbiology's highest honour, in 1895. The Manichaean manuscripts found in Turfan were written in three different Iranian scripts, viz. The first of the Pasteur Institutes was also built on the basis of this achievement. A Manichaean tp)tmn of the 8th century from Turfan written in Middle Persian mentions that most of the Khan's kinsmen were devoted to Manichaean faith. The treatment's success laid the foundations for the manufacture of many other vaccines. Some fragments of a Manichaean book written in Turkish mention that in 803 the Khan of Uighur Kingdom went to Turfan and sent three Manichaean Magistrates to pay respects to a senior Manichaean cleric in Mobei.

Fortunately, the treatment proved to be a spectacular success, with Meister avoiding the disease; thus, Pasteur was hailed as a hero and the legal matter was not pursued. And as Mani claimed to be the successor to prophets like Jesus and other prophets whose teachings he said were locally corrupted (or corrupted by his followers), so too did Muhammad later claim to be the successor to prophets whose teachings he said were locally corrupted. This was done at some personal risk for Pasteur, since he was not a licensed physician and could have faced prosecution for treating the boy. Muhammad said that his prophethood was revealed to him by an angel as Mani had claimed about himself. This vaccine was first used on 9-year old Joseph Meister on July 6, 1885 after the boy was badly mauled by a rabid dog. The title was later applied to Muhammad, founder of the Islamic religion who may have extracted this knowledge about himself from the New Testament and claimed, falsely for non Muslims, to be the last of prophets. The vaccine had only been tested in 11 dogs before its first human trial. Mani declared himself, and was also referred to, as the Paraclete: a Biblical title, meaning "helper", which the Orthodox tradition understood as referring to God in the person of the Holy Spirit.

The rabies vaccine was initially created by Emile Roux, a French doctor and a collegue of Pasteur who had been working with a killed vaccine produced by desiccating the spinal cords of infected rabbits. Mani was eager to describe himself as a "disciple of Jesus Christ", but the orthodox church rejected him as a heretic. Pasteur produced the first vaccine for rabies by growing the virus in rabbits and then weakening it by drying the affected nerve tissue. As a result they preserved many apocryphal Christian works, such as the Acts of Thomas, that would have been lost otherwise. This discovery revolutionised work in infectious diseases, and Pasteur gave these artificially weakened diseases the generic name of vaccines, to honour Jenner's discovery. It is theorized that the Manichees made every effort to include all known religious traditions. The difference with chicken cholera and anthrax was that the weakened form of the disease organism had been generated artificially, and so a naturally weak form of the disease organism did not need to be found. After failing to win the favor of the next generation, and being disapproved of by the Zoroastrian clergy, Mani is reported to have died in prison awaiting execution by the Persian Emperor Bahram I, while alternate accounts have it that he was either flayed to death or beheaded.

Edward Jenner had also discovered vaccination, using cowpox to give cross-immunity to smallpox, and by Pasteur's time this had generally replaced the use of actual smallpox material in inoculation. The transmigration of souls became a Manichaean belief, and the quadripartite structure of the Manichaean community, divided between male and female monks (the "elect") and lay follower (the "hearers") who supported them, appears to be based on that of the Buddhist sangha" (Richard Foltz, "Religions of the Silk Road"). Inoculation with smallpox was known to result in far less scarring and greatly reduced mortality than with the naturally acquired disease. On that occasion various Buddhist influences seem to have permeated Manichaeism: "Buddhist influences were significant in the formation of Mani's religious thought. The notion of a weak form of a disease causing immunity to the virulent version was not new: this had been known for a long time for smallpox. He is related to have sailed to the Indus valley area of India in 240 or 241 AD, and to have converted a Buddhist King, the Turan Shah of India. Pasteur's oxygen method did eventually produce a vaccine but only after he had been awarded a patent on the production of an anthrax vaccine. Mani's first excursion was to the Kushan Empire in northwestern India (several religious painting in Bamiyan are attributed to him), where he is believed to have lived and taught for some time.

This method used the oxidizing agent potassium dichromate. Although less in adherents than Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism won the support of high ranking political figures and with the aid of the Persian Empire, Mani would initiate missionary excursions. His laboratory notebooks now in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris in fact show that Pasteur used the method of a rival Jean-Joseph-Henri Toussaint, a Toulouse veterinary surgeon to create the anthrax vaccine. Mani also followed the holy books Puran and Kural. Pasteur publicaly claimed that he had made the anthrax vaccine by exposign the bacilus to oxygen. During this period, the large existing religious groups, most notably Christianity and Zoroastrianism, were competing for stronger political and social power. In the 1870s he applied this immunization method to anthrax, which affected cattle, and aroused interest in combating other diseases. According to biographical accounts preserved in the 10th-century encyclopedia, the Fihrist of Ibn al-Nadim, and by al-Biruni, during his youth, Mani received a revelation from a spirit whom he would later call the Twin, who taught him the divine truths of the religion.

Pasteur guessed that the recovered animals now might be immune to the disease as were the animals at Eure-et-Loir that had recovered from anthrax. Mani, being influenced by Mandaeanism, began preaching at a young age. Chamberland assumed that an error had been made, and wanted to discard the apparently faulty culture out when Pasteur stopped him. After forty years of travel he returned with his retinue to Persia and converted Peroz, King Shapur's brother to his teaching. On his return the month old cultures made the chickens unwell but instead of the infection being fatal as usual the chickens recovered completely. with many disciples to carry out evangelism. Chamberland failed to do this but instead went on holiday himself. He travelled far and wide including Turkistan , India, Iran etc.

His assistant Charles Chamberland had been instructed to innocuate the chickens after Pasteur went on holiday. It is said that communications of a supernatural character came to him. This discovery was an accident. Mani was an exceptionally gifted child and he inherited his father's mystic temperament. Upon reusing these healthy chickens, Pasteur discovered that he could not infect them, even with fresh bacteria: the weakened bacteria had caused the chickens to become immune to the disease, although they had not actually caused the disease. In the 4th- century Manichaean Coptic papyri, Mani was identified with the Paraclete-Holy Ghost and he was regarded as the new Jesus. During this work, a culture of the responsible bacteria had spoiled and failed to induce the disease in some chickens he was infecting with the disease. During his lifetime, Mani’s first missionaries were active in Persia, Palestine, Syria and Egypt.

His later work on diseases included work on chicken cholera. Mani presented himself as a saviour, the apostle of Jesus Christ’. Pasteur also discovered anaerobiosis - that some microorganisms can develop and live without air or oxygen. It combines a hagiographic account of Mani's career and spiritual development with information about Mani’s religious teachings and contains fragments of his Living (or Great) Gospel and his Letter to Edessa. Pasteur worked several years proving that it was a microbe attacking silkworm eggs which caused the disease, and that eliminating this microbe within silkworm nurseries would eradicate the disease. Then in 1969 in Upper Egypt a Greek parchment codex of ca AD 400, was discovered, which is now designated Codex Manichaicus Coloniensis (because it is conserved at the University of Cologne). In 1865, a disease called pebrine was killing great numbers of silkworms. Until the later 20th century, the life and philosophy of Mani was pieced together largely from remarks by his detractors and from late productions.

He proposed preventing the entry of microorganisms into the human body, leading Joseph Lister to develop antiseptic methods in surgery. Neo-Manichaeism is a modern revivalist movement not considered directly connected to the ancient faith but is sympathetic to the teachings of Mani. Beverage contamination led Pasteur to conclude that microorganisms infected animals and humans as well. During his lifetime, Mani’s earliest missionaries were active in Persia, Palestine and Syria and in Egypt. This process was soon afterwards known as pasteurization. He later claimed to be the Paraclete promised in the New Testament, The Last Prophet and Seal of the Prophets, finalizing a succession of men guided by God, which included figures such as Seth, Noah, Abraham, Shem, Nikotheos, Enoch, Zoroaster, Hermes, Plato, Buddha, and Jesus. He and Claude Bernard completed the first test on April 20, 1862. After receiving a revelation in his mid-twenties that came from his Syzygos— the accompanying heavenly Twin— he came to a belief that salvation is possible through education, self-denial, vegetarianism, fasting, and chastity.

With this established, he invented a process in which liquids such as milk were heated to kill all bacteria and molds already present within them. Mani first encountered religion in his early youth while living with a Jewish ascetic group known as the Elkasites. Pasteur's research also showed that some microorganisms contaminated fermenting beverages. Mani's father, Pattig, was from Hamadan and his mother, Maryam, was of the family of the Kamsaragan, who claimed kinship with the Parthian royal house, the Arsacids. While Louis Pasteur did not develop germ theory (Girolamo Fracastoro, Friedrich Henle and others had suggested it earlier), he conducted experiments that clearly indicated its correctness and managed to convince most of Europe that it was true. Mani was of Persian (Iranian) parentage. Thus, Pasteur dealt the death blow to the theory of spontaneous generation and supported germ theory. Although the original writings of the founding prophet Mani have been lost, significant portions remain preserved in Coptic manuscripts from Egypt and in later writings of fully-developed Manichaeism in China.

Nothing grew in the broths; therefore, the living organisms that grew in such broths came from outside, as spores on dust, rather than being spontaneously generated within the broth. Mani (in Persian مانی), born in western Persia (approximately 210-276 A.D.), was a religious preacher and the founder of Manichaeism, an ancient gnostic religion that was once prolific but now considered extinct. He exposed boiled broths to air in vessels that contained a filter to prevent all particles from passing through to the growth medium and even in vessels with no filter at all, with air being admitted via a long tortuous tube that would not allow dust particles to pass. Louis Pasteur demonstrated that the fermentation process is caused by the growth of microorganisms, and that the growth of microorganisms in nutrient broths is not due to spontaneous generation. In 1857, he was made administrator and director of scientific studies of the École Normale Supérieure.

In 1854, he was named Dean of the new College of Science in Lille. His doctoral thesis on crystallography got him a position of professor of chemistry at the Faculté (College) of Strasbourg. As the first demonstration of chiral molecules, it was quite an achievement, but Pasteur then went on to his more famous work in the field of biology/medicine. Pasteur correctly deduced that the tartaric acid molecule was asymmetric and could exist in two different forms that resemble one another as a left- and right-hand glove resemble one another.

An equal mix of the two had no effect on polarized light. Tediously sorting the crystals by hand gave two forms of tartaric acid: solutions of one form rotated polarised light clockwise, while the other form rotated light counterclockwise. Pasteur noticed, upon examination of the tiny crystals of tartaric acid, that the crystals came in two asymmetric forms that were mirror images of one another. The mystery was that tartaric acid derived by chemical synthesis had no such effect, even though its reactions were identical and its elemental composition was the same.

A solution of this compound derived from living things (specifically, wine lees) rotated the plane of polarization of light passing through it. In his early work as a chemist he resolved a problem concerning the nature of tartaric acid (1849). .
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He also famously quoted: "Le hasard favorise l’esprit preparé" ("Chance favors the prepared mind"). He is known to the general public for his demonstration of the germ theory of disease and his development techniques of inoculation, most notably the first vaccine against rabies; however, he also made a major discovery in the field of chemistry, regarding asymmetric molecules and the polarization of light. Louis Pasteur (December 27, 1822 – September 28, 1895) was a French microbiologist and chemist.